Escaping into Supervisor

Can I confirm that to escape into Supervisor at startup one has to press [Escape] during mod init and have Language configured to 10?

If you want to do it ‘properly’ (ducks to avoid missiles) then *unplug bootfx (which means it will start up in full screen with no candy bar) and tinker with $.!Boot.Run or with $.!Boot.Utils.DeskRun to stop the desktop being started. If you *con.lang.13 (or wherever BASIC is) then it will start up like the old BBC computer (but faster and with more memory). Things like the network won’t be there though as they get started up later.

In the old days you would just hold down SHIFT to stop the booting but things are more complicated now.

If you want to do it ‘properly’ (ducks to avoid missiles) then *unplug bootfx

No candy bar here. It’s a BB -xM

In the old days you would just hold down SHIFT to stop the booting

That’ll be the bit I forgot. Seems [Shift] or [Escape] have the same effect now.

eh?

Since when did shift-power on stop working?

The behaviour of Shift-Break was altered in RO3.5, I ended up re-implementing it in ADFFS so that games requiring it still work.

Since when did shift-power on stop working?

I thought it stopped when USB connected keyboards were not visible at initial power on (before the USB stack is set up) and you get the message ‘No keyboard present, auto-booting’.
But perhaps I just believed the message and didn’t test it!

Played some more. My dodgy memory led me to the Escape key which does something which looks similar but is not the same as shift.
Escape only works if pressed during mod init but leaves the machine without a drive. More of a bug than feature.
Shift works at start up and drops you into the configured language without running !Boot if that’s Desktop.

My excuse is I wouldn’t normally be looking at this but wanted to make a backup drive on a USB stick so wanted to configure SCSIFSDrive to 0 instead of 4 to test. Then got sidetracked :-)

What’s with all this mucking about with the !Boot directory? A simple *opt 4 0 turns off the boot option on the disc.

What’s with all this mucking about with the !Boot directory?

Huh?

What’s with all this mucking about with the !Boot directory? A simple *opt 4 0 turns off the boot option on the disc.

I think I’d have gone with *CONFIGURE NoBoot
only because that also works on a read only medium like a CD-ROM, or those that have hardwired run options because they’re not native (eg. DOSFS).

Less mucking about with !Boot is always good advice, but I think the point Chris was trying to make was that you may want some of things set up within !Boot (like networking) from your bare bones supervisor, in which case you need to stop when it gets to ‘Choices.Boot.Desktop’.

I’m lost, or someone is. My mention of !Boot was incidental.